The Brooklyn Rail

An image of the intricately decorated ceiling in Villa Torlonia, the former residence of Benito Mussolini in Rome. A photo of the cosmos, captured by Hubble Space Telescope. A picture of the crumbling architecture on Gorée Island, Senegal, the center of slave trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Shots of Roman Catholic icons. A portrait of Michael Jackson. Ghanaian landscapes.

These photographs, each uniquely cropped, framed, and layered atop or positioned adjacent to one another, are a handful of those featured in Todd Gray: While Angels Gaze, the artist’s first show at Lehmann Maupin New York since joining the gallery’s roster in 2023. Incorporating pictures taken in Italy as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome alongside imagery from Gray’s extensive photographic archive, the photo assemblages may immediately appear as a fragmented collection of juxtaposing narratives. However, close looking reveals the opposite to be true: Gray’s clever layering of forms and critical consideration of colonialism’s origins and repercussions illuminate striking parallels across time and space.

A quick glance at Gorée Island, Villa Torlonia (2024), for example, may not reveal the exactness with which Gray has aligned the circular photograph of a decaying interior within the arch pillars painted on the wall of the base image. Through this positioning, Mussolini’s Roman residence now seamlessly recedes into a decrepit villa on Gorée Island, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean that slave ships once traversed.

Such visual symphonies unfold across each of Gray’s assemblages, to varying degrees of obscurity. In Other tellings (Hollywood, Florence, Cosmos) (2024), Al Green mirrors the gesture of a heroic, painted nude in the fresco beneath him. The very subtle form of a pyramid, concealed in the background of a painting featured in Other Tellings (myth is the threshold of history, everything both exists and is imagined) (2024) is completed by an adjacent image of Caius Cestius in Rome. In Time Warp #2 (Gorée, Louvre, Cape Coast) (2024), Gray’s own silhouette parallels that of a lone, inconspicuous Black figure at the opposite end of the picture plane, rendered within the Baroque painting La Tabagie (Louis Le Nain, 1643).

Less clear than the aesthetic correlations are their theoretical associations. The story of Mussolini is not written in the same chapter as the slave trade in a history textbook. Rarely would Roman Catholic imagery be associated with a figure of a Black musical icon. Perhaps this is what the confining frames remind us of: the tendency to neatly separate certain histories, people, and places.

And yet, Gray’s ability to stitch together these seemingly disparate narratives reveals the overlooked threads of histories. The assemblages invite viewers to consider the ancient origins of colonialism; that the fortunes to commission ornate architecture and artwork may have derived from free labor; that the pyramidal forms in Rome were inspired by the very cultures the Romans pillaged and appropriated; that dictators continue to decide who is and who is not worthy of basic human rights; that the Roman Catholic church is historically complicit in these injustices, all While Angels Gaze.

In the wake of a presidential inauguration speech that directly referenced Manifest Destiny, Gray’s ability to deconstruct a linear notion of history altogether has never been more valuable. His stratified photomontages collapse time, questioning photography’s generally accepted factuality, and throwing into question the notion of a “postcolonial” world. Gray illuminates the writing of Stuart Hall, a source of inspiration for the artist, by questioning normativity.

Within many of these kaleidoscopic objects, pictures of outer space offer a moment to reflect. Here, where time is obsolete, we can think about the infinite possibilities that grow out of histories and, at the same time, what subsets of humanity are privy to such prospects. Amidst a new wave—or, perhaps, a continuation—of dictatorial leadership, we find a moment to pause and consider how the past not only shapes the here and now but, also, what is to come.